Drupal® 7 Bible

Chapter 27. Customizing the Display of Content

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Knowing the basic principles

• Understanding Views

• Understanding Panels

The content management and layout tools built into the default Drupal system provide a great deal of flexibility. Unfortunately, to enjoy the full range of the options available, you need to work with the code in the theme files. In this chapter, I look at several third-party modules that allow you to open the Drupal display options without having to be a theming ninja.

The two modules discussed, Views and Panels, combine with the custom fields functionality built into the core to allow you to extract the content items you want and then to position them dynamically on the pages of your site. The modules discussed are complex, and this chapter can only hope to touch on the many options they provide. The information presented should help you get started, but to learn more you need to explore the additional information provided on the project sites for each module.

This chapter requires you to download and install additional modules on your site.

Basic Principles

There are three ways to modify the display of content in your Drupal site. The most basic method is to use the configuration options—theme configuration and block placement—combined with creative use of the content item formatting inside the content editor. This approach is simple and requires very little advanced knowledge, but you are limited in what you can achieve.

At the other end of the spectrum ...